


Broken Bullets in a Loaded Gun

by Skalidra, theLiterator



Category: DCU (Comics), Injustice: Gods Among Us
Genre: Co-Written, Mind Control, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Psychological Torture, Suffering, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-26 15:28:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6245236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skalidra/pseuds/Skalidra, https://archiveofourown.org/users/theLiterator/pseuds/theLiterator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jason's been living outside the war for a long time, refusing to join either side while he tries to keep the world's innocents from becoming collateral damage. But that can't last forever. Eventually Damian shows up in his safehouse, there to enforce Superman's demand that Jason come to the Watchtower. He expects to have to choose a side, but as it turns out, the decision's already been made.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Skali : Hello! So, this is a story I've been co-writing with theLiterator, and uh, fair warning guys, until this posting it's been going by the code-name 'The Suffering'. So that should give you a hint of what this is going to be like. Eventual happy endings? Sorta? Some good moments? Yeah, if you're in this for the fluff, you should look elsewhere. XD Enjoy!
> 
> Lit : I can neither confirm nor deny any involvement with the affairs laid out in this document.

Jason knew it was a mistake to come back to Gotham, he knew it the second that the lead he was tracking pointed him in that direction it would be a bad idea to get anywhere close to the apocalypse of a power struggle happening between Bruce and Clark. But it was a trafficking ring, _thriving_ under the inattention of the world’s heroes, and he couldn’t just let them get away with it. He couldn’t just walk away from that many people — women, _children_ — in trouble; there’s too much hero left in him for that.

So he wiped out every single other branch of the damn thing he could find before steeling himself to go back to his hometown. Here he is, and it’s a _stupid_ goddamn mistake just like he knew it would be.

Not _two hours_ and the demon brat is standing in the living room of an apartment he’s only been in for maybe an hour tops. Damian’s still wearing a familiar red, green, and black version of the Robin suit — including that golden R over the heart — and _god_ does that make him want to beat some sense into the kid. He knows a little about the ugly story, but really only a couple of things had filtered through all the channels to get far enough off the grid to reach him.

Damian _killed_ Dick. Damian joined _Superman_. His brother is a _murderer_.

There are guns in Jason’s hands but he knows they won’t be much good. He doesn’t have any of the enhanced tech or a high enough caliber bullet to get through Damian’s new drug-induced toughness, and honestly he knows he’s pretty fucked no matter what. Maybe he can incapacitate the kid enough to get away, but the chances of that are…

Damian might have gone fucking _evil_ while he was gone, but the kid’s not dumb and he’s not weak. Even before all of this stupid drug enhancement, Damian could have given him a pretty good run for his money. Who knows what kind of tricks Damian’s picked up in the years since he saw him last?

“Todd,” Damian finally greets, voice gone somewhat deeper with age in the same way that he’s taller now, thicker and finally really showing Bruce’s half of his genes even with that mop of long black hair. Not as tall as Dick was, not yet, but he’s getting there.

“Damian,” he sneers back, debating the wisdom of swapping to his knife and maybe a stun gun or something. Or maybe even just a couple smoke pellets and he can see if he’s lucky enough to dodge the kid and get the hell out of town.

Damian’s perfectly still, standing between him and the best escape route — the living room window — and showing no signs of moving. Doesn’t matter, he knows the kid is faster than him now too and without one hell of a distraction the chances of him getting out aren’t good enough to risk. He should _never_ have come back to Gotham; what was he _thinking?_

Damian’s head shifts, twitching in little tilts each direction as he undoubtedly scans the apartment for anything that could make a difference. “I’ve been sent to bring you to Superman,” the brat tells him, refocusing after the apparent realization that the rest of his weapons — and the ones big enough they might actually _work_ — are still packed away. “Come quietly, Todd.”

He glares, trying to take stock of exactly what he has on hand and what he can possibly do to outrun someone stronger, faster, and with one hell of a lot more backup than he can hope to call in. The options are pretty nonexistent, and a lot of them rely on information that he doesn’t have. Like does Damian have any kind of nearby vehicle that could run his bike down? Or are there ten other ‘heroes’ outside, waiting to take him down if he gets free of Damian?

Or his personal favorite, does Damian have permission — or encouragement — to kill him if he resists?

“When have I _ever_ done something quietly?” he chooses to answer. “How about you run back to good old _Supes_ and let him know I’m just finishing up a lead; I’ll be out of his hair in half a day max, probably less.”

Damian’s expression slides into a little bit of a scowl, and it’s almost a growl when he says, “It is not a request. You can come quietly or I can drag you in, but Superman has demanded your presence. You _will_ leave with me.”

Well, that makes things simple. Escape, or get pushed into choosing between joining Clark’s mad bid for power or being executed. Not great options.

His teeth grit together, and he fakes a surrender. He straightens up a little bit, sliding his guns back into their holsters and then jerking for other weapons. It doesn’t fool Damian for a _second_ , he can see that, and the brat’s moving before his hands have even fully closed on the hilt of his knife and the round ball of a smoke pellet.

Somehow, he still underestimated just how _fast_ the kid is now. Maybe it was that the only people he’s seen footage of with these drug enhancements were powered already, and he didn’t think that extended to just a human. God but he was _wrong_.

Damian’s in his face like _that_ , ducking and spinning around him, at his back, and then there’s a leg sweeping his and he’s falling. He manages to turn and roll with it, _not_ crashing flat onto his back, and flings his knife at the dark shadow of movement that is Damian circling him. It buys him about half a second to get back to his feet and reach for whatever the hell he can manage to grab in his belt. The knife sticks in the wall, and Damian is running at him and he just _throws_ whatever small, plastic things he’s grabbed without actually looking at them. Which, as it turns out, is a pretty terrible idea.

Damian ducks aside, catches one of them, and flings it right back at his chest. He’s not fast enough to get out of the way even if the jerky step backwards didn’t slam his legs up against the back of a couch, and the impact against his armor explodes the capsule right in his face. It’s a blue-tinted gas that comes rushing out, anesthetic, and across the room the ones Damian dodged end up as a smoke pellet and an actual explosive.

He jerks away from the cloud of gas, tries not to breathe, but it’s too late. The world is blurring at the edges, and then Damian’s hands are grabbing his jacket at the lapels and throwing him — like he weighs _nothing_ — across the room. Something cracks when he slams into the wall, and he honestly doesn’t know if it’s him or the plaster. He collapses forward onto the floor, starts to rise, and then a foot hits his ribs. It must be relatively gentle, because his ribs don’t cave in and he doesn’t go flying through the air but he does end up flat on his back. His side _aches_ , and he can only _imagine_ the damage Damian could have done if he’d really tried.

He tries to catch his breath, tries to reach for weapons, and Damian steps down on his right wrist hard enough that it feels like it’s going to break. He shouts in pain, twists in on himself and immediately gets a snapped kick to his shoulder that lays him out flat again. His spare guns dig into the small of his back, he thinks about reaching for one, and then Damian’s sliding into a predatory crouch over him.

Jason understands that he’s royally _fucked_ at about the same time as Damian’s unoccupied knee presses down across his throat.

“Submit,” Damian demands, catching the swing of his free fist and twisting his wrist enough that pain flares up the tendons and all the way to his shoulder. “You _cannot_ win, Todd.”

He snarls, breathless but angry and _hateful_. “You _fucking_ lapdog,” he spits. “You—” Damian’s knee presses harder and he chokes, gasps for air and then strains against the brat’s pin — ignoring how it hurts, how his elbow feels like it’s going to snap — and shouts, “ _Murderer!_ ”

Damian’s whole expression tightens, and then the knee is sliding off his neck. He gets one gasped breath of free air before Damian’s hand closes down around his throat, fingers digging into just the right spots and just like that he can’t _breathe_. He thrashes, but Damian is an immovable statue with a thin sneer and he’s getting dizzy. No blood flow to the brain, no chance to defend himself, he’s _helpless_ and it doesn’t look like Damian is going to stop.

He’s not going to _stop_.

* * *

Damian had not wanted to return to Gotham City, not as he was now to them; a traitor, the snake among the wolves, the one they should never have trusted. He had been careful not to be seen until he was inside Todd’s safe house, though he knew Wonder Woman would have revelled in him being caught, and he liked, above all, to keep her happy.

There were limits to even his loyalty, however, and so he clothed himself in the night, as was his birthright, and he waited for Todd and did not allow himself to be discovered.

(That did not, however, stop the fantasies he had of being found out by Batman, being told it was all over and ushered back h— back to the manor.)

He nearly lost all control when Todd called him a _murderer_ ; Todd, of all people, had no right— no—

He forced himself to breathe, to pull his hand away from Todd’s throat before he _became_ a murderer, and figured he had only a few moments to restrain the unconscious man and find all of his weapons.

He needed to focus on _this_ act, not on those that had come before, or those that might come in the future, and before he was quite conscious of deciding to do it, he had stripped Todd down to his undershirt and set aside his backup weapon, the ziptie for Todd’s wrists making a satisfying little noise as he tightened it.

He had barely finished untying Todd’s boots when the man groaned and coughed, already fighting to regain consciousness.

A decided disadvantage when dealing with his own family, he thought, grimacing and hastening to get the boots off so he could tie Todd’s feet and check him more thoroughly for concealed weaponry.

“Oh, fuck,” Todd said, voice rougher than it had been.

Damian scoffed and trailed his fingers carefully up Todd’s legs, making certain he hadn’t missed anything unpleasant. Wonder Woman did not appreciate it when her surprises still had teeth.

“You’re still here,” Todd continued. “Why are you still here?”

Damian pressed the button on his watch that would summon his backup and settled back on his heels to regard his prisoner and wait for them to breach Gotham airspace.

The entire endeavor had been risky, and he’d been approved for extraction only, not actual physical backup, or he’d have never risked taking on Todd himself; but then, he was certain that that would not have pleased Superman or Wonder Woman nearly so well as the current circumstances did.

“Because you are still here,” Damian finally decided to answer, though it was a risk.

Everything was a risk. His fingers tightened of their own accord around Todd’s ankle, and he wondered if anyone would notice the bruising.

“Yeah, but you didn’t kill me,” Todd replied. “Why didn’t you? I mean, I’m not even your _favorite_ brother, and you _murdered_ him. So why let me live?”

Damian turns his face away and hitches up a shoulder as acknowledgement but doesn’t actively reply. He can hear the thwack of a helicopter, and he uses his grip on Todd’s ankle to haul him towards the window.

“Aw, shit, that hurts,” Todd grumbles. “Kinda wishing you had murdered me, here. Just for the record. Also I absolutely cannot wait to spit in Wonder Woman’s face. Maybe I’ll knock you out and drag you back home to daddy, too, once I’m free.”

Todd is struggling minutely against his bonds, but Damian thinks he’s waiting for rescue instead of trying to free himself.

“ _They_ won’t come for you,” Damian says, shifting Todd’s dead weight in preparation to gain their transport.

“Oh yeah? And how can you possibly know that?” Todd taunts. “They letting you in on the secret bat communications waves again, even though you _murdered_ your brother and left _him_ for Superman?”

Damian has to shoulder most of Todd’s weight to jump across the gap between the building and the helicopter. Familiar hands catch them and pull him to safety, and Jason snarls and bites when he realizes that the helicopter isn’t for _him_.

“Fuck you,” Todd snaps. “You never did care about any of it, did you? You don’t want Gotham safe, you want _power_ , and you’ll do _anything_ to get that, won’t you?”

Damian reaches for him, and Todd gets his teeth in Damian’s hand. If he were anyone else, he might lose his temper, curse, _hit_ Todd, but he can’t— he _must_ prove his ability here, or lose everything.

One of the men in the helicopter hands him a length of black strap, and Damian suppresses the feeling of utter revulsion at the familiar thick rubber ball.

“Shut him up,” the man orders, and Damian wants to snarl at him, to demand to know how he _dares_ give orders here, but he cannot, so he takes the gag and watches as a wild, feral creature takes over Todd’s eyes and he shakes his head viciously and clenches his jaw.

Damian presses his thumb on the pressure point that will force Todd’s mouth open and watches as the madness spreads, as Todd thrashes without any purpose against Damian’s grip and the zipties around his wrists and ankles.

Eventually, inexorably, Todd’s mouth opens, and Damian, impatient, shoves gloved fingers between his teeth and _yanks_ , shoving the gag in as soon as he has enough room. Todd’s mouth clenches shut around the hard rubber ball, and Damian makes quick work of securing it behind his head, allowing himself the indulgence of smoothing his hair down once he’s through. No one could possibly have noticed the gesture, silent as it had been, with the gloom of night all around them and the threat of the Gotham rebellion in the men’s minds.

He doesn’t apologize out loud.

* * *

The men don’t help him carry Todd up from the Zeta tubes to the conference room, and he doesn’t expect them too. Todd is a writhing, squirming weight on Damian’s shoulder, and he’s tugging on the collar of the Robin costume so Damian has to fight his gag response from the pressure.

Todd, he thinks, would relax into the captivity if it weren’t for the damned gag, but orders were orders, and just because Todd doesn’t know how to follow them doesn’t mean _he_ won’t.

“Calm down,” Damian hisses when they reach the last corridor before the door to the conference room. Todd snarls something incomprehensible around the gag, and then the door opens and Superman and Wonder Woman look up from the maps they’d been staring at projected on the conference room table.

“Damian,” Wonder Woman greets him warmly, and Damian dumps Todd to the floor and bows to her with the exact same degree and warmth he would grant his own mother. Wonder Woman likes to feel maternal, and so Damian has fallen into the habit of treating her the same as he had treated his mother when he’d still lived with her.

“I’ve brought him,” he says unnecessarily, nudging Todd’s already bruised ribs with the toe of his boot.

“I see that,” Wonder Woman says. “What do you think?”

“I think this was pointless,” he says, nudging harder, so Todd gasps and grunts and holds still for a few moments. “His loyalty is to himself. He has no inclination to serve the greater good.”

Wonder Woman laughs and crosses the room, tangling her fingers in his hair. Damian does not flinch.

He is too self-disciplined to flinch.

(He wonders if she would stop if he protested, but as protestations are not in his character it is not an answer he is likely to discover.)

He thinks that she sees it as an affectionate gesture, and indeed there are shades of similarity between her touch and the way Grayson had ruffled his hair up to irritate him when he’d been Batman and Damian had been _his_. But Grayson’s nails weren’t as sharp as hers, nor was his grip on the strands as punitively tight, so the similarities are, at best, superficial, and Damian chooses not to consider the gestures similar at all.

After a moment, two, longer, she disentangled her fingers and crouched to stare at Todd, finally forcing his head around so she can pull the gag free.

Todd works his jaw gingerly and glares around at them all.

“Jason Todd,” Wonder Woman says fondly. “I’d always hoped to see you in this room, taking your rightful place in our number.”

“Lady, you’re crazy if you think that’s what’s going on here,” Todd replied. She backhanded him, and Damian bit the inside of his cheek where no one could see it.

If Todd could be just _slightly_ more circumspect, this would all go a lot more quickly. _Listen to her, tell her no, and then I’ll take you back ho— to Gotham,_ Damian thought furiously, hoping to communicate the thoughts _somehow_.

“Oh, Jay-lad,” Wonder Woman says, making Todd flinch _hard_. “You don’t have a choice in the matter.”

“What?” Damian blurts, and then he bites his cheek again, trying to pretend he doesn’t notice the sudden attention he is receiving from the other three people in the room.

“Little Robin is confused,” Wonder Woman says gently, touching Todd’s cheek .“But you and I understand each other perfectly well, don’t we?”

“Damian,” Superman says, coming closer to the three of them and resting his huge hand paternally on Damian’s shoulder. “We’ve been discussing trying out the Peitarch for a long time. You agreed it would be for the best to find an extremely strong-willed person to experiment with. And it’s only going to be used on prison populations, you _know_.”

“Todd is—”

“He’s a convicted mass-murder, drug lord, and terrorist,” Superman says calmly. “You’ve never defended him before,” he adds. “Are we having second thoughts?”

“No,” Damian snaps mulishly, instead of saying the things he wants to say— instead of _but the Joker did that, the Joker made him that, just like he made you_ — instead of taking a batarang and slicing through the zipties holding Jason Todd helpless in Wonder Woman’s regard.

He exhales, and forces himself to look up, to make eye contact with Superman. “No, sir,” he says more quietly. “I’m sorry, it’s just…”

“You’re running low on brothers,” Superman soothes. “It’s understandable. But can you think of a better candidate for the trial?”

Damian shakes his head mutely.

* * *

“Hang on,” Jason butts in, twisting his head away from Wonder Woman’s touch and feeling the first stirring of unease in his gut. “Look, I’m not a part of any of this, alright? I was just in Gotham to clean up the last of a trafficking ring, swear to god.”

She doesn’t seem to like him moving away, because suddenly she’s got fingers in his hair and is pulling hard enough it feels like his neck’s going to snap. He yelps, trying to move into her hand just to lessen the pressure, and it seems to work. At least it’s just his scalp burning, and not the threat of her snapping his neck with the kind of ease he usually equates to stepping on a twig.

“Hush,” she reprimands, letting go and sliding her hand down across his cheek, along his jaw. “Didn’t you understand me before, Jay-lad?”

He flinches again at that name falling from _her_ lips, knows she’s seen his reaction but can’t help it. That’s not hers. It’s _not hers_. “I’m not your guinea pig,” he snarls, to cover up that too-obvious weakness. He tries to pitch his voice down, make it a bit more placating and less aggressive. “Just… Just let me walk out of here and I swear I’ll go right back to being halfway across the world and not interfering with anything you’re doing. I don’t want to be your enemy.”

Wonder Woman smiles like he’s said something funny, pulling her hand away from his jaw. “We know that, dear. You’ll fight for us though, no matter what you think.”

He catches the movement of Damian, behind her, pulling something that looks disturbingly like an injection gun from a shelf, and pulls against the zipties as the danger becomes immediately, _painfully_ , apparent. His struggling doesn’t get him anywhere but a couple inches across the floor, the ties too tight to get his hands through and god _damnit_ but apparently Damian did a good job of stripping all his tools off of him.

He panics just a bit when Wonder Woman stands and takes the injector from Damian, and then orders, “Dami, sweetheart, why don’t you bring Jason over and hold him down for me? Clark might crush his skull, and then where would we be?”

She turns and walks towards the table, and Damian leans down towards him with a face that looks like carved stone.

“ _Jesus_ ,” he spits, as Damian’s hand closes around his upper arm and drags him across the floor to where Wonder Woman is sitting down in one of the conference chairs. “Let me go or kill me or throw me in some damn prison but have the decency to do it with some fucking honor!”

His call gets ignored, and he spits curses and writhes as Damian pushes him down over Wonder Woman’s lap, one iron hand pressing down on his low back and the other sweeping his hair up off the back of his neck and then clenching down tight. Damian’s on his knees, and he almost laughs hysterically at the idea of Damian _kneeling_ for anyone before sharp nails are tracing up the back of his neck. One of her thighs is digging into his bruised ribs, and _god_ he’d had a couple stupid teenage fantasies about being over her lap but this is some kind of fucked up _nightmare_ perversion of it.

He tries to growl, unable to really struggle underneath the steel of Damian’s hands, but can only pull in half a breath and it ends up sounding a lot more desperate than he’d like. His feet push uselessly against the floor, and he can feel the hard press of the injection gun’s muzzle against the base of his skull, just below Damian’s hand.

“Don’t! _Fuck_ you; let me go!”

It goes off, and it _burns_. His breath comes out in a sharp, short scream as whatever the hell it is digging into his flesh gets all the way in, the pain like a knife with the added benefit of _fire_ spreading up through his skull. It’s not the worst thing he’s ever felt, not by far, but it _hurts_ and he can’t fight it like he can usually fight pain. He can only grit his teeth together and bite back the burn of tears in the corners of his eyes, feeling the trickle of blood down into his hair from whatever wound is back there. It can’t be big, and he _knows_ that, but it feels like it’s a massive slice in his flesh.

It takes a minute, but finally the pain in his skull eases and he can really breathe again, going a little limp under their hands.

Wonder Woman’s nails come back to his neck, before she orders, “Cut him loose.”

Damian’s hands let go, and a moment later he can feel the pull and snap of the ziptie around his ankles. He shifts, braces as one of those gloved hands wraps around his wrist, and finally feels the cold metal of a knife slide in next to his skin and slice that ziptie too. Damian lets go, he sees the brat step away and to the side, and Wonder Woman’s nails trace down to the collar of his shirt.

He _moves_ , shoving away and rolling off her lap. It lands him flat on his back for half a moment, but he manages to scramble up and back away without either of them grabbing him. Which is only because they’re not actually moving; neither Damian nor Wonder Woman look like they have any plan of trying to grab or stop him. Not that they fucking need to; _Superman_ is in the room and Jason’s in his goddamn socks and weaponless. He’s not going anywhere they don’t want him to.

He raises a hand to his neck, feels the blood on his fingers and as gravity starts to let it slide down the line of his spine. “What the hell did you put in me?” he demands, fear mingling with anger in his chest.

Wonder Woman’s got this little smirk, and she tilts her head and studies him. “Jason… _Kneel_.”

His knees hit the floor.

She _smiles_.

“What the _fuck?_ ” he hisses through his teeth, trying to understand the instant obedience from his body, trying to quell the _panic_ starting to claw its way up from his belly because he doesn’t remember even thinking to fight her.

He starts to push back, to get up, and she snaps, “Stay.”

He freezes in place, and oh _god_ that’s not him. It’s not his choice, it’s not his thoughts, it’s whatever the _hell_ she’s put in his head. It’s a little tug at the back of his mind, like someone grabbing and tugging his hair to turn his head without warning. He tries to resist, tries to fight the enforced stillness, and gets nowhere. _Nothing_.

“What have you done to me?” he asks through his teeth, a hard shudder sliding down his back. “What the _fuck_ is this?”

Damian’s expression tightens a little bit, but the lapdog doesn’t move from his new spot at Wonder Woman’s side. Superman is moving back into his field of vision now, coming to stand at her other shoulder with his arms crossed over that barrel chest. Those bright blue eyes are narrowed, studying him with far less warmth than she is.

“It seems to work,” the Kryptonian says, looking him up and down in a way that he’s pretty sure means x-ray vision. “If anything goes wrong, at least he’s expendable.” He fights a little harder at that, manages to get his fingers to twitch a fraction of an inch and it still feels like a loss, especially when Superman follows it up with, “Come here, Jason.”

It’s _horrifying_ to feel himself moving without having actually given conscious permission, without having _decided_ to move. He crosses the dozen or so feet he’d backed away as if he’s not even slightly hesitant, until he’s standing right in front of Superman. Then that tug at the back of his mind goes away, and he’s not fast enough to start to run before there are strong, hot fingers gripping his chin tightly enough that it hurts. It’s useless, but he can’t help trying to pull away, his hands rising to push at Clark’s arm like he could possibly do _anything_ about it.

He snarls, jerks against the grip, and Superman snaps, “Don’t fight.”

The snarl dies in his throat, muscles going all but limp as his arms fall to his side, unable to even try to struggle as his head is turned back and forth like he’s being inspected. He shakes though, heart hammering in his chest as his breathing picks up and his hands tremble like they haven’t in years and _years_.

 _God_ , he’s— He can’t— There’s no control, no fighting, no pretending. He’s _helpless_ and that’s… _Jesus_ , fuck, he _can’t_ —

Superman lets go, pushing him to his knees almost like an afterthought, but it’s Wonder Woman who orders him to, “Breathe, Jay-lad. Slow down or you’ll pass out.”

Maybe that would be better — it would _definitely_ be easier — but he doesn’t even get that mercy. The moment she’s said it he’s dragging in a deeper breath, holding it and feeling his heart slow until he lets it rush out again. Repeats a breathing count he knows by rote until he’s not skirting hyperventilation and her hand touches the top of his head.

“It’s very simple,” Wonder Woman says quietly. “You’re our ally now, Jason, and you’ll do whatever we command you to. You’re our test subject to see if this works well enough to use on our enemies as well. Be proud we thought you were good enough to give this technology a real workout.”

He swallows, shudders again, and then tilts his head up towards the two of them.

“Don’t do this,” he tries, begging and not even trying to pretend otherwise. “ _Please_ , don’t do this.”

“You’re a criminal,” Superman says, with a small note of disgust in his voice. “You’re kidding yourself if you think I care what you _want_ , Red Hood. Diana, make sure he gets a full physical before anything else.”

His breath catches as Superman turns and walks away. “No! _Jesus_ , don’t— This is _slavery!_ How can you not see that?! You can’t just—”

“Hush,” Wonder Woman reprimands, and it’s like his words curl up on the tip of his tongue before shoving themselves back down his throat. He chokes, jerks hard at the feeling as he stares up at her. “It’ll be alright, dear. I’ll be taking care of you, after all. You’ll learn to accept your place, and once you do it will all be easier. I promise.”

He can’t miss the way that Damian, half behind her shoulder, _flinches_.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Skali: Welcome back! (You remember how we said this was just going to get worse? Yeeaaaahhhhh...) I would have more to say but I am just back from a con and I am bone tired, so go ahead and read, and I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Lit: Here, have some more delicious angst! :D

Damian follows behind Wonder Woman as she guides Todd through the Watchtower with murmured orders and a hand to the small of his back, considering every option he has.

He can’t extract them himself— he is free to leave at any time, of course, per Superman’s acceptance of him as a full time member of the League, but Todd will be under careful guard and the alarms that will go up should Damian take action to neutralize those guards would make most plans impossible to implement.

He has normal communications off of the Watchtower every sixth week, when he meets with Selina in Metropolis to have a very public lunch.

Superman pretends to turn a blind eye to such outings, though he knows, based on the timing of this mission (informed of the particulars as soon as he’d returned, and ushered off the Watchtower and straight to Gotham without even a moment to himself to change. He’d been folding his tuxedo neatly even as they’d approached Gotham air space.) and the fact that Damian himself has told him.

He’d been reluctant, of course, and then he’d blurted out the truth and ducked away— that he hoped Selina was acting as his father’s proxy, that she’d tell him how sorry he was.

Superman had embraced him, and rocked him, and told him that even Dick would have forgiven the accident, for it was an accident, and Damian had forced himself to relax into the comfort, to nod a grudging agreement.

Which left his four emergency communiques. He hates to use any of them, since any message he would manage to send would have to be tiny, at most a few letters, and he’d have to encode it all himself, in his head, and he’d have to rely on luck to be sure no one noticed the digital noise piggybacked onto an official Watchtower communication feed.

What would he say? What could he say? “I kidnapped Jason Todd and now they are enslaving him” seemed a bit blunt, and not as urgent as he should have liked.

He’s still turning over the possibilities when they reach the infirmary, and Wonder Woman sends Jason to sit on the stretcher with an order and turns to Damian, a concerned frown warping her features. “Dami, honey,” she says, sounding, with all the feigned warmth in her tone, exactly like his mother. “If this is going to be a problem for you, I don’t mind having a new guard assigned for a short while.”

“We discussed this,” he replies, inclining his head as he would to his mother when she used that tone. He tells himself it’s deliberate. “You will need to test the extreme limits of the Peitarch and I am the only member of your League with the training to do so thoroughly.”

“We can always ask Sinestro’s assistance,” Wonder Woman reminds him.

Damian scoffs and gestures dismissively. “He cannot be trusted.”

Wonder Woman leans in and brushes his cheek with the back of her hand, smiling warmly. “He fears war,” she says in agreement. “Not like you or I, who were born to fight.”

He tries to smile for her; is glad that the expression is one he is not normally comfortable with because he is sure it comes out as twisted and wrong.

“My mother named me conqueror,” he agrees, and Wonder Woman practically croons at that. She’d taken great pleasure, in their first interview after Grayson’s death, in telling him the meaning of his name, and in the legacy of Alexander and of Ares who was diminished now, dying at _her_ hand. “But I thought we were here to end war?”

Wonder Woman scrapes her nail along his cheek, leaving a line of hot pain in its wake. “It takes war to end war, Damian, you know that, too.”

Damian glances helplessly at Todd, who is bound by her word and could not move.

“You don’t even like him,” she continues, patting his cheek again. The cut from her nail stings. “And you haven’t been allowed to stretch your wings in years. You’re a kid, like Clark says. It’s okay to have fun.”

They strip Todd, and Damian doesn’t have to hold him this time, so he stays back, out of the way of the medic who is not Dr. Thompson, and of Wonder Woman who is touching Todd here and there as his skin is revealed.

The examination is physical, and he can see the humiliation and fury in Todd’s eyes, though his limbs are lax and he is responsive to Wonder Woman’s instructions. It makes Damian’s gut churn, and he carefully turns his focus back to his emergency message.

He must send it as soon as he can get away. If Damian can hardly suffer observing, it must be orders of magnitude worse for Todd, who is enduring it alone inside his head.

It was disheartening, in a way; if ever there were someone for whom Peitarch would have no effect, outside of meta-humans, and perhaps Damian’s father, it would have been Todd.

At least, with the drug in Todd’s system when they are extracted, Father should be able to manufacture some sort of antidote and then they will all be better able to sleep easy.

“Damian,” Wonder Woman says, the crisp tones of command back in her voice. “Jason’s going to follow you to the brig. I’ve told him you have a surprise waiting for him there. I’ll be down in a few minutes— you’re not to get too carried away without me.”

She smiles as she brushes past. “For right now, he’ll listen to everything you tell him,” she murmurs.

Todd is still naked on the stretcher, and no clothing has been left for him, but worse things will happen to him than nudity, tonight, so Damian does not allow himself to dwell on it. “Get up,” he says, and Todd glares murder at him as his body complies.

“Follow me,” Damian says, turning crisply on his heel and leading the way out of the infirmary, catching sight of their reflections from gleaming bulkheads so as not to have to look back and reveal any more than he already may have.

That is the other critical thing, the aspect of this far more important than extraction. What Todd does not know, he cannot tell, and Damian remains alone in his mission.

A cell in the brig has already been set up for him, and Sinestro is watching them from across the hall, calling criticisms already, and Damian has to set his jaw to keep from retorting, from retaliating. It is not by his choice that Todd is naked, or even that they are down here, but he is Todd’s only chance, and he cannot fail now.

The forcefield goes up as soon as they are in the cell, and Todd jerks at the noise, which Damian ignores. He had wondered if the control would extend to instinctive reaction like that automatically, or if it would require specific orders.

Shortly, it would be his responsibility to discover that.

“Go, stand in front of the far wall, facing away from me,” Damian orders, and Todd goes, just as smoothly as if it were something he had chosen to do.

Damian knows that not looking will be a torture in and of itself; the not knowing could create great, overwhelming waves of fear, and to heighten that response, he starts sorting through the implements left to his use, allowing them to clatter against the work surface.

Todd’s shoulders are tense, but he doesn’t turn around.

The realization that among the various implements is a crowbar arrests him, and his hand hovers over the thing, because he cannot bring himself to even touch it, and he wonders whose idea this had been.

He knew, perhaps better than anyone, than even his father, that neither Wonder Woman nor Superman were sane anymore, but this—

Few things, in Damian’s life, were sacred. In the League, one worshipped Ra’s al Ghul, and Damian was his grandson, a demigod who bowed to no one but his mother and her father. In Gotham, things had been much the same, though altogether different: his father had required no worship, and Grayson had never slid into Damian’s life in a role that would command it, first rival, then brother.

But this. This was an act of pure evil, an act he was not sure all the promises of safety and rescue anyone might offer him could compel him to make, and he thought of bowing to his grandfather in the heart of Nanda Parbat in that moment.

“What’s up?” Todd demands, shattering the spell Damian had been held under. “Finally chicken out? You gonna order me to leave so we can get out of here? We don’t have to go back to him, you know. I’ve got a couple of safe houses, friends.”

Damian scoffed. “You waste your breath,” he says, finally forcing himself to pick up the crowbar, if only to set it aside. Todd flinches at the resounding noise it makes when it hits the table, though he cannot know what it is.

“Damian, I know we’re not the closest,” Todd begins, and Damian’s hand closes on the handle of a many-thonged whip. It is, perhaps, cliched, but the classics exist for a reason.

Or so he’s been told.

“But this is… this is wrong. It’s not even on the same level as murdering Dick, it’s— there’s no coming back from this. You can’t… you can’t tell me to stand here. Please, Damia—” the gasp of pain cuts off his name, and Jason Todd still doesn’t turn around.

That would be enough for Damian to believe in the efficacy of the technology, because he has known Todd since he was very young, and even catatonic, Todd wouldn’t ever allow someone to hit him without hitting back.

The forcefield drops, and Damian glances over his shoulder at Wonder Woman, who has brought a chair, and knows it is not his curiosity they must satisfy.

He readies the whip again. “This time,” he says, “I want you to scream when it lands.”

* * *

When he does, he doesn’t know if it’s the command or just a normal reaction. Damian’s second strike is horizontal, aimed at his upper left thigh, and the straps of the whip curl around his muscle with loud _snaps_. Sensitive skin, _dangerously_ close to pieces of anatomy he’d really like to protect but can’t even twitch in defense of.

The whip slides against his leg as Damian pulls it away, before it cracks down over his back. That drives the breath out of him, but it’s not as bad and he can endure it for now. Dimly, he knows that Damian must be exercising very _exact_ control of that drug-enhanced strength because the kid could probably flay his skin right off his bones without too much effort. That means this is testing, it means…

It means that all the worry that had sprung up when he was listening to Damian’s conversation with Wonder Woman is _definitely_ founded.

They’ve put something in his head, some kind of tech that makes him all but their slave, and they want to know how far that goes. This isn’t torture for the sake of torture — he hopes to _god_ it’s not — but to see if pain will break the control. To test automatic reaction, maybe even survival instinct if it goes that far.

Will he keep standing here, mentally bound, until they kill him? He’ll blackout first — he knows torture; too well — but if it keeps going, if they come back at him when he wakes up, will he just let them kill him? The question grates in his chest, occupies his attention even as Damian’s strikes spread fire over his back. He can feel himself bleeding, feel the sharp sting as that whip splits the skin high on his back, tearing slices into his skin that burn every time his muscles tense in reaction to a blow.

A particularly hard strike drives a groan from between his teeth, and he tries to brace for the next blow but it doesn’t come. He squeezes his eyes shut for a second, tries to evaluate how bad the damage to his back is without actually being able to turn and look. It feels nasty, and he can feel the blood sliding down his waist and legs, but it doesn’t feel like he’s bleeding too badly. Not yet, anyway.

“Is that it?” he baits, breathless but snarling because that’s all he has left.

There’s a moment of silence, before Damian tells him to, “Clasp your hands behind your neck.”

It hurts like a _bitch_ to do it, but he’s got no choice. His arms bend up, fingers curling around each other as he grits his teeth and tries not to think about how the slices in his back are stretching or how it burns. He’s not quite getting what Damian thinks he’s accomplishing though; what’s the point in having his hands up when he can’t fight anyway?

He gets his answer when the whip comes down horizontally, straps wrapping around his right side with all that added force and knocking the breath right out of him. He gasps, bows in on the ache of it and then cries out.

“Straighten up!” Damian snaps, and god _damn_ the brat but his body just does it. “Stay still, Todd.”

There’s that tug at the back of his mind, and _fuck_ the second blow hurts even more than the first but he stays straight. He can’t help the shout that bursts from his mouth, or the way his muscles tense and shudder, but he doesn’t jerk in on himself again. He _can’t_.

Damian hits him two more times — he knows the right side of his ribs is going to be a mess of bruises — before pulling back. He sucks in a sharp breath when the whip touches his left side, cold _fear_ whiting out his mind for a second. This is bad enough, but a strike over his already bruised ribs? That—

“ _No_ ,” he breathes. “God, _don’t_.”

The whip comes down, and he _screams_. He barely registers that the most he moves is a tiny inwards flinch, because in his head he’s spiraling. It’s _agony_ , and he can’t— He can’t even move, he can’t curl up to protect his side or fight chains or _anything_ , and that’s even worse. The pain is one thing — pain he can handle — but the ability to fight is something that’s never been stripped from him before. Not like this. He’s been tied up, held down, made helpless before, but no one’s ever taken his ability to resist. He could always struggle, however useless it was.

It’s _terrifying_ to have no option but to accept.

The touch of the whip against his low back snaps him back to himself, and when it slides over to his left side he can’t even start to fight the whimper that slips between his teeth. He— He doesn’t think he can take another hit like that. He tries to brace anyway, squeezing his eyes shut against the burn of tears and trying to somehow prepare for another shot of that agony.

It doesn’t come. Instead, Wonder Woman’s voice cuts into his consciousness. “Jason, put your arms down and come over here.”

Moving is an agony all on its own, and he lowers his gaze and keeps it on the floor as he moves to stand in front of her. He barely pays attention to the way Damian steps out of his way, except to flinch away from the sight of that whip, which only comes out as a tiny twist of his torso that he immediately regrets.

“Kneel.”

The sudden buckling of his knees doesn’t surprise him as much this time, but he does shudder when her nails scrape across his scalp and pull his head down, baring his back and neck to her gaze. He shudders again and flinches away when those nails slide down and trace one of the stinging lines sliced into his back.

“Well, looks like you’re behaving already,” she purrs in a satisfied tone, and _fury_ comes back to life in his chest.

He launches himself upwards, swinging for that _fucking_ smirk on her face and ignoring the pain from his back, his ribs, his neck. He just wants her to _hurt_ , to let go, to get her _fucking_ hands off of him. Then a steel hand is wrapped around his wrist and another is at his throat, stopping him in his tracks like he’s _nothing_. She’s still smirking, and he realizes too late through the anger and the pain that she was just baiting him to see if he’d respond.

He grabs at the hand on his throat, snarling as he tries instinctually, uselessly, to get away. He can still breathe, _barely_ , but it’s not enough.

“Damian,” she says sweetly, “come over here.” He catches a flash of Damian from the corner of his eye, before Wonder Woman twists his left wrist — the one she’s caught — enough that he parts his mouth in a cry he has no air to voice. “Jason should learn not to strike his superiors. Break his fingers, dear.”

He jerks hard, manages to gasp, “ _No_ ,” before she tightens her fingers a fraction more.

“Be still, Jason.”

Damian’s gloved fingers curl around his wrist, taking it from Wonder Woman almost gently. Not that it _fucking_ matters because he can’t pull away even without anything really holding him. He can’t really _breathe_ either, and that’s going to be a problem if it doesn’t let up fairly soon. Or maybe a good thing. _Jesus_ , his life should not have come down to hoping he passes out so he doesn’t have to feel his fingers break.

Damian lets go, but the command holds his left hand in the air like he’s some kind of fucked up marionette. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Damian slowly unbuckle one glove, then the other, and his gaze stays trained that direction as Damian’s hands come free of the gloves and they get hooked into the belt to stay. Bare hands; precision. Good, that means that this is going to be careful, which in turn means that he might stand a pretty good chance of not having any permanent damage from it.

If there’s some _mad_ chance he gets out of this — which looks less likely every second — it’d be damn nice to actually have use of his fingers.

“Diana,” Damian says quietly, almost subservient and god that’s _fucked_ up in so many ways. Damian fancied himself a prince before all of this; what the hell happened? “He’s not one of us; he cannot breathe.”

His head is pulled up, and he snaps his gaze back to Wonder Woman as she eyes him. Then that smirk reappears, and the hand around his throat lets go. “Of course, Damian darling,” she purrs as he gasps in air against the sore ache of his throat. “I forget how fragile men can be.” Then her gaze is falling to his, fingers tracing up his throat and two _sharp_ nails pressing his chin up. “We can have some fun with that later, Jay-lad. Some activities should be kept between adults, hm?”

That statement, that _idea_ , shocks him so much that he almost misses Damian’s hands curling around his fingers and wrist. At least until there’s a precise jerk to his little finger, and he feels the shock of the snapped bone slide up his arm as he shouts in both pain and surprise. God, it is _not_ the worst — he’s had fingers broken before — but there’s three more to go, four if Damian goes for the thumb too and why wouldn’t he? Jason’s life is already careening downhill, what’s one broken thumb to add to the pile?

He breathes through his teeth, shudders, tries to block out the pain. Wonder Woman’s nails press a little harder to the bottom of his chin, forcing his head back into a bit of an arch. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” she murmurs, and the new, sickly thought in his head makes it sound like some parody of a lover’s whisper.

To his _horror_ , his mouth opens and he just starts talking.

“You’re insane; you’re _evil_. God, you’re talking about rape like it’s _fun_ , what the hell is wrong with you?” His head twists, gaze rising to Damian. “Why are you helping?” he asks, almost _begs_. “Jesus, Damian, you were a pain in the ass before but you weren’t _this_. You weren’t some goddamn lapdog!”

Wonder Woman nods, and he cries out when Damian snaps his second finger without warning. The trace of fingers across his cheek is all nails, and it stings even past the pain of his fingers. His breath comes sharp, rushes out of him as he twitches away from the touch.

“Keep going,” she orders.

He shakes. “It _hurts_. Fuck you, _fuck you_ , it hurts! Taken worse; not your _goddamn_ guinea pig and I’ll fucking kill you when I get out of this. You can’t— You _fucking_ bitch you can’t break me; I’ll tear out your goddamn throat first you—”

Damian breaks another finger and he screams.

He squeezes his eyes shut, chokes on a breath and feels the burn of tears. Tries to distract himself from the pain with _anything_ , and the thought of long red hair and pale skin isn’t in his head for more than half a second before he’s almost sobbing, “ _Roy_. God, fuck, I miss Roy. Shouldn’t have left him, shouldn’t have come back to Gotham, should have just _stayed_.”

“Tell me about Roy,” Wonder Woman orders, and he freezes at the realization of what’s come out of his mouth.

But not before it’s parting again, obeying even as he _screams_ inside his head not to. “Arsenal,” he breathes, shuddering. “He was Red Arrow; Speedy. He’s— We’ve been working together, trying to keep the world from falling apart.” Wonder Woman gives a small nod, watching him expectantly. “I— He’s my partner, I trust him, I… He’s probably the only friend I have.” He tries to choke it back, tries to stop himself from betraying that little secret, but that tug at the back of his mind won’t go away and he just can’t _stop_. “And more. Not safe for civilians to be around us so we— we mess around. It’s just casual, we’re not—”

“True lovers?” Wonder Woman finishes. “Good. I might have had to send someone to bring Roy in if he had any claim to you, Jason. I usually don’t share my toys with others.”

“I’m not your toy,” he spits, against his better judgment but fueled by the pain and the _fear_ of the fact that he just reminded her that Roy exists.

Her smile _screams_ danger, and the trace of her nails down his jaw actually doesn’t sting. “Is that right?” She tilts his head up, forces him to look her in the eye. “Jason, _sweetheart_ , ask Damian to break that last finger.”

His eyes widen, breath catching in his throat, and she pushes his head to face Damian, holding it down by a grip in his hair that burns a little.

“No, _beg_ him for it, Jason.”

He shakes, but his gaze still rises to meet Damian’s. It makes him sick to his stomach, but his lips part around a, “ _Please_. Break it, Damian. Fuck, I— _Damian_ , please.”

Thank _god_ Damian moves quickly. He shrieks at the snap of his pointer finger, wanting to jerk away but there’s that tug on the back of his mind and he _can’t_. Wonder Woman pulls his head up, twisting to straighten him up again and refocus his attention on her. It might have worked, if he wasn’t sinking back into a spiral.

His hand is a _mess_ of agony, his back isn’t helping, and he just… He just _can’t_.

“See, Jason?” Wonder Woman says as he stares up at her, sounding distinctly pleased. “You’re _mine_ , even your own words know the truth, you just have to accept it.”

His vision blurs a bit, and he blinks where he’s half-floating, not quite feeling any of it. It takes him a second to realize that his breath is coming as hard and sharp as if he were about to hyperventilate — again — and another to realize the world is swimming a bit.

He sways, hears a voice he can’t decipher, and swallows one shaking breath away. This has to all be some nightmare. It has to be some awful dream and he’s going to wake up in Roy’s bed and everything will be _fine_ , that’s how things like this usually go.

He’s not some goddamn pet, he’s not a toy, he’s not—

He collapses.

* * *

Wonder Woman calls the guards in to take Todd back up to the infirmary, and then she gestures Damian to follow her, and they go up to the wing with the living quarters.

When he’d first arrived on the Watchtower, he’d spent the night in Superman’s room, being comforted in his grief.

The next night, the security protocols had been rewritten and Damian given the quarters immediately between Wonder Woman’s and Superman’s— _Batman’s_ quarters.

“He won’t be using them,” Superman had said, and “You have more right to them than anyone else.”

The quarters had been spartan, but Lex Luthor had decided that he, personally, was going to supply Damian with everything he had left behind with his father and his home, and his assistant was more than generous with supplying him books, which had replaced the trophies on his father’s bookcase, slowly taking over the available space in the room.

Each of them had a personal note on the flyleaf, and Damian had carefully aligned them on the shelf in the order in which he had received them.

Wonder Woman doesn’t even glance at the shelf when she comes into the room, merely sizing up the sleeping accommodations in the far corner and frowning.

“We’ll have to have Lex figure out a way to get a second cot in here,” she says, turning to Damian, who schools his expression into something suitably perplexed.

His mind is scrambling to make contingency plans, if he is to share quarters with the enslaved Jason Todd. Before, he had at least this little bit of space to himself, so long as he kept his back to the cameras and didn’t allow his autonomic system to change its even, steady pace.

Now, though—

He _might_ have trusted Todd with his secret, because Todd’s body being enslaved was one thing, but the way Wonder Woman had compelled him to talk about Roy Harper meant…

It simply meant he was still in the exact same position as he had been before. Nothing more. He refused to allow himself to _feel_ otherwise, refused to give himself away like that, so easily.

“Well, he _is_ Bruce’s son too,” Wonder Woman is saying.

Damian bites the inside of his cheek.

“It’s as much his right as yours, after all. And Clark and I want him kept close, anyway.”

Damian forces a pained smile. “Of course, Diana,” he murmurs, inclining his head to her.

“Don’t worry, Damian sweetheart. I don’t intend him to spend much time in here once he’s recovered from his injuries.”

Damian nods, and the door whisks open to reveal Todd, supported by two guards and trailed by another pair.

“So soon?” Wonder Woman asks, but she goes to him, patting his cheek. “Jason, you’re going to be staying here. Don’t leave this room.”

She turns, casts a glance over her shoulder at Damian, assessing. “You can’t hurt Damian, but you don’t have to listen to him, if you don’t want to.”

Damian swallows hard. He still hasn’t been able to send an emergency communique, and now he won’t have opportunity to, at least not until after the League meeting that afternoon.

Additionally, he is _tired._ He hasn’t slept since the night before last, which had been a restless one because of the delicate situation with Selina and his lunch with her.

The door closes them into the room alone together.

Damian clears his throat and goes over to Todd, wrapping the wrist of his injured hand in a tight grip and peering at the splints on his fingers. He doesn’t bother trying to order Todd into compliance, doesn’t bother asking permission he knows won’t be granted.

He is relieved to note that the swelling is minimal, and the index finger, which he’d been afraid had been dislocated, doesn’t show any worse symptoms than the other three. For what it _is_ , it is fine. (He has not lost his control yet.)

He drops Todd’s hand and takes a step back, assessing his murderous look and deciding to busy himself with doing anything other than interacting with the man.

He spends a few minutes at the computer terminal, watching a series of videos from the Gotham Zoo with the sound muted, before Todd finally crosses the room to the cot and flops down onto it.

There is a low groan of pain, and Damian can’t help himself, he glances over his shoulder at him, and grimaces in sympathy at the ginger way he’s got his good hand pressed to his bad side.

That had been—

It had been exactly what Wonder Woman wanted, he reminds himself, and he is no good to Todd if she becomes suspicious of him.

 _More_ suspicious of him. Superman has accepted him at face value, but she has not; she isn’t blinded by his adolescent body the way Superman is.

And to think that less than two years ago, he would have been _pleased_ by that.

“Todd,” Damian finally allows himself to say, unsure what he wishes to follow it up with.

“Don’t,” Todd hisses.

Damian spins in the chair and looks at him, dead on.

“Don’t what?” he asks.

“You’re going to… apologize,” Todd says, sucking in a breath.

Damian shakes his head. “I did what is necessary,” he tells him carefully. Superman’s hearing is superlative, and he will be listening in on this conversation, if for no other reason than to protect Damian from Todd should it become necessary. “I only hope one day you will understand.”

“I understand that you took everything _he_ gave you, and you said ‘fuck it all’,” Todd says.

Damian flinches from his tone, stands up from the chair and scowls at Todd. “You have _no idea_ what I did,” Damian snarls. There is rage coiled inside him, a rage he has fought for _years_ to subsume beneath his rationality. Years of Grayson's efforts, of his father's, all undermined by a few words from a man who can't even control his own _words_ anymore.

He fights to master himself.

“You killed Dick,” Todd says, sounding as tired as Damian feels, and the guilt he’s been holding back by sheer force of will threatens to well up inside of him _too_ , and he cannot afford that, so he bites the inside of his cheek while Todd continues. “He was— kill Tim, sure, no one gives a fuck about Tim, and hell, I don’t know that I care all that much about Dick. Cared. But, it’d be like if _I_ killed _Bruce_.”

He could let the words hang unacknowledged between them.

Instead, he says, low and quiet and cruel, “The difference is that Grayson _loved_ me,” and watches as the fury snaps through Todd like wildfire. He smiles as Todd surges up, good hand winding for a badly telegraphed strike that Damian knows will never land.

“What.” Todd says, staring in shock at the barest millimeter that separates his hand from Damian’s face.

“Wonder Woman ordered you not to hurt me,” Damian points out, and Todd surges forward again, rocks back.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he spits, and then he is clutching his ribs where Damian had kicked him, had _whipped_ him, and Damian steps around him to the minifridge. The only thing he keeps in it are icepacks.

Well, and three of the flavored ice pop _things_ Grayson had been fond of that had been present already when he’d taken over the room.

Damian presses the ice pack to Todd’s injured ribs before Todd can react to protect them. “Twenty minutes—”

“I know the deal,” Todd says. “Fuck you. Where do you get off on… on… _this.”_

Damian shrugs, wanting, more than anything, to _tell_. Knowing, even as he wants it, that it would be suicide to do so.

“Lex usually arrives early for meetings,” Damian says, ignoring the question entirely. “I’m sure you can find ways to entertain yourself here without me.”

He grabs the pointless domino from its shelf, presses it over his eyes, and leaves Jason Todd in Batman’s Watchtower quarters behind him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Skali : Welcome back! So, continuing on previous trends, this is a chapter of much pain and suffering. (What a shock, right?) Proceed carefully, this is basically a minefield of different ways to hurt both Jason and Damian. Enjoy!

Lex Luthor is waiting for him in the Watchtower conference room, and Damian doesn’t bother trying to smile at him.

“Damian,” Luthor greets, folding him into an entirely unwanted embrace. “I see you’re still playing Robin,” he adds, drawing back and scrutinizing his appearance. “Are you sure you don’t want to re-invent yourself?”

Damian shrugs. “I’m fine,” he says.

“You’re getting older,” Luthor points out. “You’re no longer at all associated with Batman.”

Damian bites his cheek to keep from responding.

“If it’s about Richard, may I make a small suggestion?” Luthor asks.

Damian raises an eyebrow, and Luthor pulls out a paper bag. It’s stuffed with tissue like a purchase from an upscale boutique, and Damian approaches it warily.

Luthor has yet to try to kill him, but… but he _knows_ , and Damian is honestly merely waiting for Luthor to decide what to do with his information.

He gingerly parts the tissue and peers inside. There is, predictably, a book, and even though Luthor is practically salivating in anticipation of Damian getting to the actual surprise, Damian thumbs the cover of the cheap paperback open, and stares at the note on the flyleaf.

_For Robin; stay away from the sun._

Damian flips the book shut, and closes his eyes to think, just for a moment.

“Is everything okay, Damian?” Luthor asks. “My assistant says you’ll like this one.”

“He is usually right,” Damian replies. The message has no meaning, no secret encoded within it. Up until a year ago, Damian would not have known the handwriting, but it was familiar enough now, since Luthor’s assistant liked to send up books for Damian to peruse. “I am fine.”

“Good,” Luthor says. “Now, I know you’re not going to read a _book_ while a mystery is waiting for you; you’re too much like your father in _that_ respect. Open it.”

Damian pulls out the contents of the bag, holds it up.

“Did your assistant select this, too?” he asks sardonically, staring at the solid black costume, at the red, armored shoulders, and the splash of design across the chest. He pretends his palms aren't suddenly prickled with sweat, that his heart is not hammering so furiously in his chest that Superman will surely come find them in a moment.

“Does it matter?” Luthor asks, leaning forward to pick some speck of lint off the armor. “There are those who question your true loyalties, Damian. This would put those doubts to the rest.”

Damian snorts. “It would,” he says, letting the irony he is feeling color his tone and hoping it is _enough_ to disguise his true emotions.

“You should try it on,” Luthor says, squeezing Damian’s shoulder, and Damian nods mutely.

He knows Luthor is right, but the idea makes his bile rise and he wants to find a dark place to hide for a few hours so he can _breathe_.

The thing about being _Robin_ is different for him than it had been for those who came before, no matter that he had always denied it.

Robin was not about his father, or his birthright; it was about Dick Grayson, and somehow, he knew that donning Nightwing’s costume would acknowledge the schism he’d been pretending didn’t exist, and he did not know if he was strong enough to bear that.

Except that he had been strong enough in the cell with Wonder Woman and Todd to break every finger in a man’s hand when he’d sworn to himself to do no violence that wasn’t warranted. He might be strong enough for this.

“I’m running low on candy,” Damian says, apropos of nothing and of everything.

“Write me a list,” Luthor says. “I’ll be sure my assistant picks some up for you.”

Damian nods, and Luthor produces a pad of paper from an inner pocket; the pen comes from a drawer in the conference table.

Luthor’s eyebrows raise at what the note says, but he shrugs and pockets it. “One day, Damian Wayne, I will fully satisfy your sweet tooth; mark my words.”

Damian snorts just as the door opens to admit more members of the League.

* * *

It’s a relief to be alone.

When the door closes on Damian’s back he can finally tilt his head back, grit his teeth together, and clutch the icepack as hard as he wants to. It’s an agony all by itself to have it on his bare skin, but he hasn’t got all that much choice but to deal with it. At least it’ll do the job of numbing out his ribs, for a little while. Maybe then he can try swapping it over to one of the other injuries and see if that maybe buys him a few more minutes of not being in quite as much pain.

The people in the infirmary — none of them seemed willing to look him in the eye — didn’t give him anything for it, and he doesn’t know if that was their choice or Wonder Woman’s orders. He hadn’t even woken back up until midway through them treating him, and the four guards in the room had convinced him that any kind of escape attempt was only going to end in pretty dismal failure, even if that awful tug at the back of his mind stopping him from running was gone.

He’s not in any condition to take on one of those drugged up bastards, not with his left hand being all but useless and his ribs and back screaming every time he moves in any way that disturbs them. That’s basically just moving at all. He’s definitely not in any condition to break out of the goddamn _Watchtower_ , especially not while trying to avoid what’s left of the League, and _especially_ not when there’s at least two people that could freeze him in his tracks with a single word.

Would the instruction have to be face to face, or could they just broadcast it through the speaker system? There are definitely some questions that need to be explored, and he’s sure they’ll get around to it. On the other hand — he shoves out a bark of laughter that _hurts_ — he definitely has more answers now.

Yes, their orders can stop him from all automatic reaction except some very small flinches. Yes, he will stay on his knees or standing until he blacks out. No, they can’t stop him from blacking out, not unless they catch it in time to get him to breathe and fight it back. Wonder Woman has full control, theoretically so does Superman, but they can give that control to others if they tell him to listen. Orders seem to supercede any previous ones, at least to a point.

It’s an awful, miserable truth, but the more Jason knows about how it works the more likely he can find some way to get around it. He just has to remember that he can still get out.

He’s not insane enough to think that anyone’s coming for him. Even if Roy — god, _Roy_ — knew where he was, there’s no way his partner has the power or the connections to get him out of this fortress of a place. Hopefully Roy will join the Resistance, or stay so damn far underground that no one finds him. He’s not sure he could survive seeing any of this happen to his teammate, and Roy would just be another perfect experiment to these lunatics.

Bruce…

Yeah. No one’s coming. He’ll get out of this on his own, or not at all.

He can’t stand being still, so he turns away from the door and looks around. Damian’s room — that’s what it has to be — is pretty big. There’s not all that much in it, not at a first glance, except the open workstation and a bookshelf. Walking over to the workstation tells him that it’s locked down, password protected, and he tilts his head and considers how hard it might be to hack.

Unfortunately, he comes to the conclusion that it’s more than likely past his skill level. Based on Bruce’s original designs, and then almost definitely upgraded and modified by Cyborg? Yeah, not gonna happen. Roy could probably jury-rig together some kind of bypass out of the parts of the console, and Tim could probably take the defenses apart with enough time, but that’s never been Jason’s specialty. The best he could do would be to destroy it, which while _tempting_ probably isn’t the best use of what energy he’s got left.

He loops the room in a slow circle, pinning the ice pack down to his side with his elbow so he can use his actual working hand to open drawers and rifle through them. Most are empty, but there are a few with some carefully packed clothes that he takes a petty kind of glee in messing up and leaving open. He’s gone almost all the way around the room when he opens the drawer beneath the foot of the bed and finds more clothes. He almost wrecks these ones too, before he realizes they’re too big to belong to Damian.

Carefully, he kneels down in front of the drawer and pulls one of the collared shirts out. It comes out in crisp, perfect lines and with a faint disturbance of dust, like it’s been sitting there for awhile. Definitely bigger than Damian, even a bit bigger than Jason, and—

His hand clenches in the shirt as the realization hits.

Of course, these are Bruce’s clothes. This is _Bruce’s_ room, probably just handed off to Damian when Bruce left for good. What does it mean that the clothes are still here, after all this time? Is Damian actually feeling guilty, or for some reason can he not bear to touch them?

It’s fucked up either way, but there’s at least one good thing about it. Bruce might be bigger than he is, but not by that much. This clothing should more or less fit him, and it might not last long — if he’s reading Wonder Woman’s fucking _creepy_ vibes right — but it’ll be nice to not be wandering around naked for at least a little while.

He sifts through the clothes in the drawer, rolling his eyes at the fact that there’s not a single thing in here that won’t make him look like he’s off to some corporate meeting. Whatever; something is better than nothing.

He pulls a pair of black boxers out of the drawer, some matching black slacks, and a light grey collared button-up that’s underneath and a little less dusty than the rest. Getting dressed is, well, _painful_ as all hell, but he manages fairly decently. Luckily, Bruce is just enough bigger than him that the shirt doesn’t press tight against his back and, bonus, he can actually get his splinted hand through the sleeve without any serious pain. Also luckily, he’s pretty good at doing up buttons one handed. The clothes aren’t ideal, but they fit well enough to not fall off and that’s good enough.

The icepack gets relocated to his other side, and he actually closes that drawer before moving on. Eventually, he winds up standing in front of the bookshelf, looking at the precise rows and titles. Older books, secondhand and clearly well read. Strange, because he really can’t ever remember Damian picking up a book that wasn’t some kind of training manual or biography of a target. Or something art related, but nothing here looks even remotely tied to art.

Maybe it’s a new hobby? But then why would a little entitled demon brat like Damian pick up old books like these? Why wouldn’t he get new copies, or at least hardcover?

Jason pins the icepack under his elbow again and reaches forward, pulling a book at random off the shelf and flipping it open. He flips through it quickly once, then flips back to the front to take a look at the title page and the chapters. Dark ink catches his eye, and he carefully slips to the very first page of the book to read the note written near the top.

_For Robin; keep swinging!_

His eyes narrow, and he sets the book back down on the shelf and grabs another. There’s another message written in that one, then the third, and fourth, and _anger_ is heavy in his stomach as he throws the last one to the floor.

Who the _hell_ is giving these to Damian? Who is important enough that the brat would actually keep books that _clearly_ aren’t to his taste around instead of trashing them? What _bastard_ is sending Damian, the _murderer_ , these inane little pieces of encouragement?

Before he knows entirely what he’s doing he’s reaching in, pushing his good hand in between books and yanking hard enough that half of the shelf comes tumbling down at his feet. Then it feels too good to resist, and before long all the books are on the floor and the shelves are completely bare. It’s not enough though, and he sinks down to his knees among the fallen piles and grabs the book closest to his hand. It takes a little repositioning to get one side of its cover pinned under his knee, but then he’s free to use his actually working hand to manually rip the pages out.

It’s small, it’s petty, but god it feels pretty damn _good_ to get revenge in even such a small way. To be able to do anything at all to get Damian back for fucking _torturing_ him, actually, since apparently what he _can_ do has been sharply reduced down into what he’s _allowed_ to do.

If this horror show of having no more control than a puppet is going to continue, he’s _damn_ well going to take advantage of every second that he’s free, and he’s going to rebel in every possible way he can.

He’s going to _start_ by tearing apart every goddamn book in here.

* * *

Damian doesn’t bother trying to wait through whatever it is Luthor has to say to Superman after the meeting. He makes a detour on the way to his quarters, nodding at Cyborg who is on monitor duty as usual.

“Mind if I check my email?” he asks, as if it’s an afterthought, whirling just before he leaves the room to find a workstation instead.

“What?” Cyborg asks. “You have a terminal in your room—”

“And a new roommate,” Damian interrupts, curling his lip in disgust and shaking his head. “He doesn’t need to see my private correspondence.”

“You know _I_ can see your private correspondence, right?” Cyborg asks.

Damian sniffs and straightens his spine, feigning a level of composure he doesn’t feel. “And therefore I am perfectly comfortable looking at it while _you_ are in the room. May I?”

“Sure, why not,” Cyborg says, turning his attention back to whatever it is he pays his attention to. Everything, Damian supposes, suppressing the visceral reaction the thought brings.

Damian is careful when he types the command into the terminal, he keeps his eyes on the much larger window with his email, pretends to care about the hot young singles in his local area with a great deal more intensity than any of his emails should garner.

Taps enter. Hopes he typed everything correctly.

Hopes his message will be seen.

Damian deletes the spam message, looks at the empty stretch of his inbox, squashes down the _emotions_ he cannot give in to, and stands up.

The bag with the new uniform and his new book are waiting for him at the door, and Todd is waiting for him in his room.

He thinks it might be polite to tell Cyborg thanks, or good night. He doesn’t bother with any of that and leaves silently.

He reaches his room before Luthor or Superman, or even Wonder Woman, which is a relief, because he thinks the email excuse may have been a little _too_ thin, though last time Wonder Woman had asked him why he bothered if no one was writing him, Superman had read his panic as upset at the lack of contact from his father and intervened.

Thankfully. Superman’s cosseting was vastly preferable to _any_ attention from Wonder Woman.

The door whisks open at his touch, and he stops short in the doorway.

Todd is a crumpled heap in the corner, hand pressed against his side, his eyes slitted with poison awareness. Every drawer is open, and all of Damian’s clothes are strewn haphazardly around.

Well, every drawer save one, though Todd had clearly found that one, since he is no longer naked.

Damian has to appreciate that his father’s clothes fit Todd fairly well, and wonders if he would be able to wear them as easily once he reaches his full growth, or if he’d favor his mother more.

He _has_ to think about that, something inane and out of his control, because the rest of it—

They are in _shreds._ He doesn’t even _like_ the damned books, but they’re _his_ books, and they had been utterly destroyed, which doesn’t even make _sense._

Todd only has one hand. It doesn’t make _sense._

Damian breathes carefully, in through his nose on a five count, out through his mouth for ten, and again.

He wants… he _lunges_ for Todd, a sharp noise making its way past his iron control, but he stops himself from hitting Todd, or hurting him in any way, because he _knows_ Todd cannot fight back, and he has made a vow to himself to never harm the helpless.

His fingers close helplessly on the collar of his father’s shirt, hauling Todd out from his little huddle of pain, snarling wordlessly at him for a few seconds.

Todd’s good hand curls around his wrist and his fingers flex, but don’t tighten, because _Todd cannot fight back_.

Damian forces himself to let go, to step back.

“How.” he bites out, all too aware of how much he sounds like his father in that moment.

Another might ask _why_ , but Todd is _helpless_. Why is as obvious as the destruction itself.

He takes another step back, over the heap of shredded paper, because Peitarch or not, Damian will not put his back to the wild animal trapped in this room with him, and then he crouches to touch the shreds of paper and covers.

He can see the remnants of one of the notes, “For Ro” in blocky capitals, and he touches that piece, closing his fingers on it for just a second.

His breath stutters in his chest, because—

After today, he will not be Robin any longer; the notes will change to reflect that, and they will say “For Nightwing,” and they will be a lie, and…

His hand goes to his lips, his eyes sting, and he topples forward to his knees, bracing himself with his free hand.

His head aches awfully, and the exhaustion of the past few days catches up with him all at once, and he _must not react._

He knows, though, that it is already too late, a thought which is confirmed by Superman’s voice calling from what feels like a great distance away, but based on Todd’s flinch must be fairly nearby, and then he is being gathered up in strong arms and rocked against a solid chest.

“He ripped them,” Damian mumbles, a response to one of the thousands of questions Superman is dropping on him all at once. “I don’t know how he _could_ have.”

“I’m sure he’ll apologize, Damian,” Superman soothes. “And Lex is still here; he likes it when you give him lists of things to bring you. We’ll get you new books.”

Damian doesn’t _want_ new books, but he has just enough control not to say so.

“Clark?” Luthor calls, and Damian can hear his footsteps as he enters, and then there are three people too many in the room now. “Oh,” Luthor says mildly. “Jason Todd, I presume?”

Superman must be paying better attention to Todd than Damian is, because a crisply intoned, “Hold!” has Todd freezing in place.

“Well,” Luthor says after a second of them all in frozen tableau. “I will take care of Damian, and you will … do as you will with Jason, I assume. You’ve already entered the testing phase for Peitarch?” Superman doesn’t reply, but he gently disengages from Damian and lets Luthor take his place, though, thankfully, Luthor doesn’t try to _hold_ him.

“They’re just books,” Luthor says quietly, though he does hand Damian a nearly intact flyleaf that says ‘For Robin; don’t look down.’ Damian stares between the page and Luthor, and slowly he folds it and slips it into one of his belt pouches.

“I am well aware of that,” Damian replies coolly.

“So, it seems Clark’s suspicions are correct and you and your brother will not be able to share the bed,” Luthor says, and he’s got most of the books in a tidy pile now, so Damian stands in order to fetch a plastic bag to put them into.

Superman has his hand around Todd’s throat, and Damian’s own goes completely dry.

“Clark!” he snaps in a perfect mimicry of his father’s voice, and Superman turns on him, dropping Todd and whirling, the back of his hand catching Damian’s cheek hard enough to fracture the bone, since it’s been almost a day since he’d last taken the pill and it’s starting to wear off.

Damian yelps out of the mingled surprise and pain, his control completely gone after the day he’s had, and Superman’s eyes go wide with shocked horror.

“Damian!” he says, leaning forward, hand outstretched, but Damian flinches away, hand pressed hard to his cheek, trying to keep back the threatening tears. _You are stronger than this_ , he thinks, but he might be lying to himself, now.

“You should go, Clark,” Luthor says. “I’ll look after him.”

Superman nods, closes his hand around Todd’s throat again, and flees.

“That was incredibly stupid,” Luthor offers, opening up the minifridge and pulling out an icepack, which he tosses to Damian. “Since I know you won’t go up to the infirmary.”

“It will heal the next time I take a pill,” Damian replies. “Leave.”

“I need to—”

“ _Get. Out.”_ Damian snarls, using his father’s voice again.

Luthor holds up his hands and backs out of the room. “You really shouldn’t do that voice thing, you know,” he offers just before the door slips shut.

Damian presses the icepack to his cheek and takes up Todd’s corner, making himself as small as possible, like he always had when he’d displeased his mother.

There are three ice pops left in the freezer, he remembers, and he crawls over to it, pulls one out, and tries to pretend Grayson had given it to him.

_It’ll make you feel better._

_No it will_ not _. It is frozen sugar water._

_Try._

It does ease the dryness in his throat some.

* * *

Jason hits the ground rolling, and only instinct and luck lets him pull his left hand in against his chest and curl around it, protecting it as he rolls and then finally slams — back first and _god_ that hurts — into a wall and stops. He can only gasp in pain, before a hand is curling in his shirt and dragging him up the wall like he doesn’t weigh a damn thing.

He keeps his left hand tucked in against his stomach, grabs at Superman’s wrist with his working hand and kicks out at him. He hits, but it feels like kicking solid fucking concrete and has just about as much effect on the Kryptonian watching him, mainly that it aches like a bitch and doesn’t do jack shit to the thing he’s hitting. At least it distracts from the fire of his back and sides, or the pull of his shirt against his neck.

“You hurt him,” Superman almost growls, impossible blue eyes narrowed, and he feels that old fear burst back to life in his gut.

The one born of the fact that Superman is _terrifyingly_ powerful, when he stops holding back, and really not so stable anymore. Not since the Joker, and yeah, he can fucking _relate_ to that.

“I’m not the one that hit him,” he snaps back a little breathlessly, because apparently he’s got no real sense of survival instinct. Arguing and taunting the alien powerhouse holding him against the wall is probably not the greatest idea, but it’s all he has. He can’t hurt Superman, can’t get away, can’t even really fight back and Superman could stop him with a single word.

Superman is easy to read, but the succession of emotions across his face is anything but reassuring. Guilt, pain, and then _anger_.

He gets slammed up against the wall again, would cry out if it didn’t knock all the breath right out of his lungs. Then, before he can even begin to react, Superman is throwing him the opposite direction. He doesn’t even get the luxury of rolling across the ground this time, just hits the wall with all that force before falling to the floor. His hand gets caught under the weight of his torso, _agony_ slicing up the nerves of his arm, and he chokes on a scream he doesn’t have air for.

“I could tear you limb from limb before you could _blink_ ,” Superman snarls down at him, and he forces himself to look up, to drag in enough air to speak.

“You _won’t_ ,” he pushes, breathless and weak but he can’t just give in. “Compromise your little fucking experiment, wouldn’t it?”

“Shut up!”

It’s almost a shout, and he arches his neck and chokes again at that same feeling of having his words shove themselves back down his throat. He opens his mouth, tries to speak anyway and just _can’t_. The words sit in his chest, and no matter how hard he tries he can’t force himself to say them.

“You think you’re not replaceable?” Superman’s hand curls in his hair, shoving his head flat against the floor hard enough that for a fraction of a second he worries his nose might snap. “You think _I_ can’t replace you?!”

He can feel the heavy weight settle over his back, the brush of what has to be knees on the outside of his hips. Instinct and fear makes him act, and he twists his torso so he can get his left hand out from underneath him, trying to ignore the _shrieking_ of his sides and the pull of the cuts in his back as he gets his broken fingers safely out of the way. There’s no saving the rest of him, but at least if Superman goes after his hand the damage won’t just be an accident.

There’s a couple moments of silence, a moment where the hand in his hair lets up, fingers grazing and almost feeling—

“What a mess,” Superman says, interrupting whatever the hell the moment is and letting go of his head completely. That hand presses flat against the top of his back, fingers edging beneath the collar of his shirt, and then _hard_ pressure jerks against his shoulders.

He yelps at the pain of the shirt pulling against his sides as well, before the fabric rips and it lets up. Superman’s free hand shoves the torn shirt to either side of his back, and he can feel blood smear over his skin, realizes the cuts on his back have actually torn open and he’s bleeding again. He can barely even feel it over everything else that hurts.

Superman’s hands shift, pressing down on his shoulders, and then _fire_ slices up his back.

He screams, shoving against the ground with his good hand and trying to struggle, but Superman is unmoveable steel and doesn’t even _shift_. Another burning slice, and this time he can hear the distinctive buzzing hiss of what has to be that heat vision. He can’t help shaking, screaming into the floor until it dies into a breathless sob. His breath comes in sharp gasps, when he can manage to actually breathe and not just scream.

Until finally it stops, and he spends a few seconds tense and ready for the next burning line before Superman lets go of his shoulders. Tears are leaking down his face, and he’s still trembling, but at least the immediate pain has stopped. He gasps in another half a breath, curls his good hand into a fist, and presses his forehead to the ground to try and manage the sudden agony carving lines up his back.

“There,” Superman comments, satisfied almost like it’s a fucking _good_ thing. “No more blood. No more _mess_. You weak humans; how do all of all of you bleed so much, be so _fragile_ , and still manage to be the leading race on the planet? You should be smears on the ground, with how _delicate_ all of you are.”

Jason squeezes his eyes shut, not sure whether to laugh hysterically or just sob over the knowledge that Superman just burned the slices in his back shut, and somehow thinks that’s _better_. What next? Is his hand going to get cut off because his fingers are broken? Would it be better to rip his ribs out of his chest to stop them from breaking too? What fucking insane kind of world has he been dragged into?

His mind settles on laughing, and he gasps out a couple of hysterical, breathless noises that sound too much like the Joker for his own comfort before his head is being slammed into the ground again. He feels his nose break this time, and the laugh sharpens to a cry of pain.

“Keep your mouth shut,” comes the snapped order. It’s easy to read _anger_ in Superman’s voice, slightly harder to pick up on the little shake to it that makes him remember, again, that both of their worlds were torn apart by the same person. Anything that reminds him of the Joker is going to remind Superman too.

His mouth closes, as ordered.

“Why would you hurt him?” Superman demands, and suddenly he’s being pulled up and back to his feet by his shoulders. He doesn’t even get to look around or try anything before he’s shoved into the wall face first, one hand wrapped around the back of his neck and a too-hot body pressing too close. “Damian is a _child_ ; why would you hurt him?!”

He tries to answer, to point out that Damian was adult enough to fucking _break his fingers_ , but his mouth won’t open and _sharp_ fear bursts to life in his chest at a realization. He can’t open his mouth, his nose is broken and bleeding, and those two things together means he can’t inhale. He’s not going to be able to _breathe_.

“You arrogant—” Superman’s free hand hits his right side with a flat palm, and he feels something crack as his world spins sickeningly for a second at the _pain_. “Stubborn—” Fingers dig into him, pressing down on probably broken bone and he jerks, gives a muffled cry with the tiny fraction of air left in his lungs. “ _Blind_ man! It was an _accident!_ He never meant to hurt Nightwing!”

God, he can’t— can’t _breathe_.

 _Think_. He can hold his breath but not for much longer, and either Superman hasn’t realized he’s suffocating or doesn’t care. Neither option is good. He needs to get Superman’s attention, and make him realize what’s going on. That’s the only possibility that doesn’t end in him passing out, and he’s getting kind of sick of doing that. He can’t speak, so he has to make Superman _look_ at him.

Those inescapable fingers are still digging into his side when he forces himself to go all but limp, twisting his right arm back and finding Superman by touch so he can give two firm taps to what he’s pretty sure is the Kryptonian’s hip. Just like he would if this was some kind of spar; that’s an ingrained thing in anyone who learns to fight and it _should_ work well enough to give the impression he’s surrendering.

Sure enough, Superman stalls out for a second, and then he’s being flipped and shoved against the wall again, this time facing out. Superman is staring at him, and he flips his injured hand up towards his throat to try and communicate the problem at about the same time the lack of air gets to him. His shoulders jerk inwards, neck arching as his lungs work for air they can’t get. _Won’t_ get.

“Breathe!” Superman orders, sounding just a little horrified, and instantly his mouth falls open and he drags in a breath that’s too deep.

The oxygen rush makes him a little dizzy, and he slumps against the wall and gasps to get the air back in his system. The taste of blood hits his tongue, but honestly he can’t focus on anything more than breathing at the moment. It _hurts_ to breathe too deeply, with the kind of pain that tells him he definitely has a broken rib, but he can’t stop.

“Jason…” Superman lets him go, and without the support he slides down the wall and to the floor.

He looks up, finding Superman’s gaze, and another realization clicks into place with stunning clarity. The expression on Superman’s face, the choice of words, the roughness, the demands for answers…

Clark is looking at him and seeing _Bruce_.

The realization sinks to the pit of his stomach like a stone, and he wraps his mostly working right arm around his sides and gut, like that can somehow protect them, as he lowers his head. He’s wearing Bruce’s clothing, Superman had him mostly silent or face down, and he _knows_ he’s not that far away from looking like Bruce. Not quite as solid, an inch and a half too short, slightly longer hair, and his face is all wrong, but at a glance, or if you happen to be a fucking _unstable_ superpowered alien, it’s not a hard jump to make.

Superman reaches down for him and he flinches away before he can even start to hide the reaction. What does it _fucking_ matter anyway? Superman can read his heart, his breathing, his pulse, so it’s a fucking certain fact that Superman must know he’s scared. Scared because stuck in the middle of Clark and Bruce’s politics and whatever the hell their own personal feelings are is about the _last_ place he ever wants to be. He’s helpless, trapped, and on top of it all he’s playing punching bag for one of the most powerful people on the planet. All because he had the awful luck that he just happens to look a _lot_ like Bruce, probably more than any other Bat with the possible exception of Damian, and Damian isn't old enough to fit that role.

“Get up.”

He can’t help but obey, though he leans on the wall and doesn’t give up the protective curl of his arm. Then he reaches deep, finds the well of anger he’s spent his whole _life_ trying to keep held down, and lets it curl his mouth in a snarl.

He meets Superman’s gaze, and spits, “Next time you hurt me, how about you do it because of what _I’ve_ done?”

He’s almost expecting the backhand, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. It’s just a tiny fraction of Superman’s strength though, because his head snaps to the side but he doesn’t get flung to the ground, or feel anything crack. Compared to the agony of his sides and back it’s practically nothing at all, just a reprimanding swat.

“Stop talking.” At least this time there’s just that weird feeling in his throat, and no words he was about to say that shove themselves down it too. “Keep your hands off Damian, and don’t touch anything of his without permission. Is that clear?”

There’s nothing forcing him to answer, but he shifts his head in a nod anyway just to get it over with.

“Then we’re done here. Except for _one_ thing.”

He barely has time to register that before Superman is twisting, gaze glowing red, and then that _fire_ slices up the back of his calf. He jerks in a breath to scream, and gets it out at the same time as that same _pain_ slices up his other calf as well. He staggers, almost collapses, before Superman’s hand is pressing against his right shoulder and holding him up. His knees almost buckle anyway; both legs protesting the new burns stretching from the back of his ankle to just below the back of his knee.

“Now we’re going to walk back to Damian’s quarters, and _maybe_ this will teach you to mind that attitude. _Walk_.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Enjoy!)

Damian stays huddled in the corner of the room until the lights dim and go out, until he’s eaten the entire ice pop (which had turned into a dripping mess at the end), until the door whisks open again without his permission.

His reflexes are muddied, and he almost trips himself up in trying to get to his feet, but Superman is too busy prodding Todd back into the room to notice Damian’s blunders, which is in itself a sort of relief.

A short-lived relief, of course, because Todd is— his eyes are wide and unfocused, a symptom of shock, and he’s swaying, barely able to keep his feet even with Superman’s support, and Damian takes his other side, careful of the injuries he inflicted and wary of new ones.

“Now,” Superman says. “You stay here. And mind what I said.”

Todd doesn’t reply, but then Superman doesn’t seem to care, as he leaves as soon as Damian has Todd’s full weight.

Damian spends several long seconds supporting Todd and scoring him with his gaze, trying to assess his injuries before deciding that they are well outside his abilities to care for.

“Infirmary,” he says, slipping to support Todd’s other side, which seems less injured, and carefully turning them back toward the door, which whisks open again, and Damian… drops Todd.

It is _embarrassing_ , but it’s been too long since Damian took the pill and he can’t carry Todd, and Todd doesn’t seem willing to touch him, which… is fair, he supposes.

“Come along,” Damian hisses. “Or do you just want to lie there and _bleed_ all night?”

Todd just _stares_ at him, which is completely disconcerting, until Damian realizes that Todd’s been ordered to _stay_ , and therefore cannot physically leave.

Damian starts cursing inside his head, every foul word he’d ever learned, and ends up spitting them out aloud when he tries to figure out a way to lift Todd that will get him to the infirmary.

He is fairly certain one does not exist.

It does _not_ make him feel any better, the noise, so he stops abruptly, and redirects his focus into getting Todd back to the bed.

His shirt is in shreds, and Damian touches two extremely sore spots that cause Todd to flinch away before he gets a good grip, but at least in this direction, Todd can help, shuffling his feet minutely (and had Superman done something to his _legs?_ ) and leaning in the direction Damian steers.

He still won’t grab Damian’s shoulder, not even with his good hand, and Damian doesn’t have time to waste wondering about that, but he does.

“Okay,” he whispers aloud, even though he shouldn’t. He wonders if talking will reassure Todd; hopes it will reassure _himself._ Grayson always spoke his way through his actions, smiling for Damian and wrapping his hands around Damian’s to show him so he would get it right.

Alfred had rarely spoken, but he’d made sure Damian’s eyes were on him every time he fixed a wound in a new way, and that was almost as effective.

Damian will _never_ be Alfred, so talking it is.

“Your nose is broken,” he reports, settling Todd upright on the bed and ducking to peer at it.

The lighting is too dim, so, unthinking, he steals his father’s voice again and orders them brighter. Todd’s flinch is decidedly _not_ because of the greater illumination, and Damian thinks Luthor may have had a point, earlier. He dismisses the thought— he can reprogram the room later; add Todd’s voiceprint in with his own.

“I’m going to set it,” he announces. “Look at me,” he commands. If Todd had been ordered to obey Damian, he would have gone to the infirmary, before, but he hadn’t. Still, his gaze locks with Damian’s, and Damian is quick and sharp with his motions, and Todd groans wetly. Damian goes to the fridge and collects another icepack and fetches a cup of water from the bathroom. “Slowly,” he says. “You’ll make yourself sick.” He lets Todd drink the whole cup before handing him the ice and taking his injured hand up.

The bones were well-splinted, but the swelling seems worse on the index finger, and Damian says, “I’m going to check the joints,” even as he probes at the swelling. It doesn’t _feel_ dislocated, which is good, but the swelling is— he carefully maneuvers that hand so it’s holding the ice to Todd’s face. “Two birds,” he says, smirking. He’s pretty sure that’s meant to be an aphorism but he cannot, for the life of him, recall ever hearing Grayson finish the phrase.

Todd may well be scowling at him, but Damian wouldn’t know.

He takes his utility knife from his boot and cuts away the shirt Todd was wearing, grimacing at the destruction. It isn’t as if his father didn’t have a hundred more just like it, but... Pragmatism is not always important in emotions, he’s been told.

There is discoloration on _both_ sides of Todd’s torso now, and Damian prods at the new injury. He can _feel_ bone shifting under muscle, and Todd’s pained gasp is just short of a suppressed scream.

“I can’t—” Damian whispers, jerking back. He doesn’t have any way of setting them properly, nor any way of strapping them securely. He might be able to make a splint of sorts with the ruined shirt, but he doesn’t know _how_ ; Alfred always had _supplies_ , a hospital in miniature deep in the Cave. “I’m sorry,” he adds. “I _can’t.”_

Todd doesn’t make any sort of acknowledgement, still not speaking, though he looks like he sorely wants to. _Another order, then,_ Damian realizes, and it’s like his blood has gone cold and sluggish inside of him.

He’d thought Todd’s compliance a tacit agreement, because he’d forgotten that here, now, Todd could do nothing _but_ comply, and he stands staring at Todd in horror for far too many heartbeats before he can make himself act again.

“That will just have to wait until we get Clark to order you to the infirmary tomorrow,” Damian decides, nodding once, firmly, to cement the decision. “Now, let me see your back.”

Todd nods just slightly, and Damian helps settle him down on the bed, on his stomach, with pillows to support him so he can breathe, and Damian sees what Superman has done.

He clenches his hands into fists, and then tries to focus on what he knows about burns. Hypothermia is a problem, so he’s got to cover up the parts of Jason that haven’t been burnt so he doesn’t get cold, but that’s almost impossible, because he’s _also_ got to cool off the parts of Todd that _have_ been burnt, and those are… his father’s slacks, burnt _into_ Todd’s flesh, and he can’t suppress the gorge that rises, though the only thing he’s eaten since lunch yesterday was an ice pop.

He makes it to the bathroom sink before he is sick, thankfully, and it’s mostly dry heaves, and he lets them run their course before he turns on the faucet and splashes his face.

Right.

He has seen worse, he tells himself. _Inflicted_ worse— except that he hasn’t. He _hasn’t_ because this much torture has the potential to be fatal and if he was ordered to _kill_ he went ahead and did it clean, a sword through the throat, or the heart. Poison maybe, but always clean. Properly, like an assassin.

Not this, not the work of a _madman_.

He hopes his message has made it, because he does not know how much longer Todd will survive.

He throws towels in the tub and soaks them with water as cold as he can make it, drapes the sodden result over Todd’s back, and bites out, “I’ll return shortly,” in a way that he is sure _could_ be reassuring but he can’t be bothered to care isn’t.

Superman sleeps right next door.

* * *

Jason’s throat closes around any kind of an answer, if he could even have managed to string one together before he hears the door close. He doesn’t know whether it would have been sarcastic, or grateful, or just a plea to never come back and let him just slip away. Not knowing is probably the best option.

The cold, wet fabric over his back is soothing, at the same time as it feels like it’s leeching into his skin and slowing him down. Logically, in that tiny part of his mind still somehow managing to function past the pain and the shock, he knows that’s precisely what’s happening.

Burns are nasty, hard to treat, and come with too many complications. Even if Damian has a first aid kit in the room somewhere — he doesn’t remember _finding_ one, earlier — it won’t be enough to fix what’s been done to him. He knows that; Damian knows that. If he could help, if he could just have forced himself to walk back out that door, maybe he’d already be getting the care he actually needs. As it is, he doesn’t have any choice but to wait.

He can’t speak, can’t leave the room, literally _can’t_ put his hands on Damian…

It feels like a leash hooked right to his _mind_ , right at the base of his skull and all someone has to do is pull and he follows right along with whatever they want. Sometimes in strange ways — this inability to touch Damian comes to mind — but it always seems to work.

He’s not entirely sure why he’s letting Damian do any of this. Sure, he can’t touch the kid, but he hasn’t been ordered to obey, or behave, or anything like that. He _could_ have driven Damian off, or at least tried to. But then his nose would still be crooked, there wouldn’t be an icepack numbing out both his hand and that nose, and he’d still be in the kind of shocked agony that he was when he ‘walked’ in the door.

And Damian… He doesn’t make sense.

The Damian that bruised his ribs, whipped open his back, and broke his fingers, that one he at least partially understands. A murderer, a bastard, a lapdog son of a bitch who turned his back on Bruce and everything to do with their family. But the Damian that broke down at the destruction of a bunch of worthless books, apologized for not being able to set his ribs, and was sickened by what Superman had done to him? That one doesn’t match up with the other. That one implies that Damian is somehow balancing having real emotions, and _caring_ about him, with not even hesitating or blinking when it comes to torturing him.

Damian is a lot of things, but he’s sure as hell not the kind of sociopath or psychopath that would make both of those roles true. One of them has to be fake, at least somewhat. Some of what he knows and has been shown has to be lies.

A Damian who cares about his family wouldn’t have killed Dick, or joined the League. A Damian who _doesn’t_ care about his family wouldn’t have thrown up at the sight of his back, or stroked his hair back in that strange little moment in the helicopter.

Jason doesn’t know which role he wants to be true.

* * *

Damian considers _not_ going to Superman for a few heartbeats.

It’s not that he fears the alien’s reaction, it’s that he doesn’t… he no longer wishes to be responsible for the situation he is in, and the simplest way to disavow responsibility would be to leave.

He pictures it— if he leaves, Todd will likely die, for no one knows of his wounds or his shock, and it will be six hours or longer before anyone decides to look in on him. Todd may well prefer to die tonight than live in bondage, although there is no way to confirm that.

Damian would not, of course, be free to return to the cave, to his _home_ , but Ra’s still has his own influence, and he has not always held an open hand to Damian, but Damian has enough valuable information that he could convince his grandfather of his earnestness, and he would be free.

He bites the inside of his cheek, because lying to himself will not help matters at all— he would _never_ be free at his grandfather’s side; he’d be a killer again, and the torture he has inflicted on Todd today will pale in comparison to the crimes Ra’s would have him commit.

So, not Ra’s. He has safe houses in several cities throughout the world, there are plenty of places he can go to ground and—

And watch as the world dissolves into chaos and dictatorship around himself.

No.

And he will _not_ leave Todd to die, not now, not knowing what the death of his son would do to Bruce if it happened again.

The door whisks open at a touch, and Damian stands on the threshold, arrested by the position of the occupants of the room.

Wonder Woman is naked, astride Superman, her hands pressed flat to his chest, a golden strand holding his hands over his head. Her hair cascades in dark waves around her shoulders and sweat glistens on her skin in the faint light of the hall, and Damian is trapped, staring.

She is… otherworldly in her beauty, but he cannot help but consider that his mother had been prettier, and not as cruel.

He watches as they have sex, her rutting against Superman, who is held helpless by her lasso, their mouths occasionally meeting wetly, and he wonders that so many people would claim they would kill to witness _her_ like this.

It is… fascinating, and he stands watching for far too long, considering that his one-time brother is _dying_ in the room next door.

“Clark?” he calls, remembering at the very last second that he should perhaps stop mimicking his father’s voice in tense moments. “Diana?”

Her eyes snap to him first, with Superman slow to follow, his face flushed with pleasure and his expression dazed.

“Damian, sweetheart, we’re busy,” she says. He blinks.

“Yes, Diana,” he says deferentially, bowing his head slightly in respect. “And I would have allowed you to continue, but Jason Todd is dying.”

“What?” she demands, climbing off of Superman and Damian finally averts his eyes.

She seizes a silk dressing gown and ties it on; though it covers far more of her than her usual armor, there is something _obscene_ about Wonder Woman in a dressing gown, and Damian swallows hard and fights to master his reaction. If she decides he is no longer a child—

But she won’t, because Damian is skilled enough at this.

She joins him in the hall and as the door whisks closed again, and she takes his face in her hand and tilts it so she can see the discoloration from Superman’s blow.

“Oh, Damian,” she says. “How badly did you— oh, just go into my room. I’ll take care of this, I promise.” She smiles a cold and reassuring smile. “We won’t have you a murderer all over again, I swear it.”

Damian doesn’t bother correcting the assumption; she’ll find out the reason soon enough, and he will handle that when it comes.

He touches her door and makes his way straight for her bed, where he collapses and forces his mind to empty, so he can obtain some much needed rest.

His father had taught him _this_ much, at least, is his last thought.

* * *

When Jason slides back to awareness it’s like drifting on fog. He stays there for awhile, listening to the sounds around him but not understanding, slowly remembering where he was and what happened before he blacked out on Damian’s bed.

For one moment, he considers the idea that he might have actually died again, and that this is some kind of afterlife. But the moment after that he recognizes the disconnected, dull sense of feeling from his limbs as painkillers. _Quality_ painkillers. If his memories are correct, and if he hasn’t been in some kind of coma or something, those are probably the only reason he isn’t in complete agony right now.

He slowly realizes he’s on his back, realizes there are people talking around him and even more slowly manages to start to understand the voices. One is Wonder Woman, and the other is male, but he doesn’t recognize it.

“—permanent?” Wonder Woman asks, and her tone is cool, detached, but with an edge of irritation.

“Not likely,” is the answer to whatever question she had, “but the recovery time would be at least six weeks, and the scarring will be… extensive.”

The detached, Bat portion of his mind keeps his breath carefully even, stops any reaction that might give away the fact that he’s awake. Information is more important, and there’s nothing he can do right now anyway. He doubts he could get together the coordination to even get to wherever the door is, never mind the other people in the room or whatever kind of needles are probably in him. Painkillers only go so far.

There’s a long silence, or maybe he fades out for a few moments, but then Wonder Woman speaks again.

“And with one?”

“No scars,” the mystery man answers, “but with this level of injury it will still take some time. Two to three days would be my estimate; the worst of it will be the last to heal completely which would be his ribs and fingers.”

The dots finally connect in his head, past the drug haze, and he realizes they’re talking about him. What exactly they’re considering he can’t quite understand, but it’s definitely about him. If he could just make his mind _work_ …

“How quickly could he be moved?”

“Immediately. He might be stable enough to move without it right now, if you wanted, but I wouldn’t recommend it. If he were given the pill, he wouldn’t need any of the medication we’ve got him on now, and the effects should neutralize any further damage that might be caused by moving him.”

His restraint fails him, and his breath catches. The _pill?_ Are they talking about dosing him up on their fucked up drug enhancements? Turning him into another one of their freakishly strong soldiers? If they turn him into one of those, send him after Bruce or the rest of the rebellion… God, how much damage could he do? Would this mind control be enough to make him do that?

They can make him stand still to be hurt, can they make him hurt other people? There’s a sick certainty in the back of his mind that he’ll find out, sooner rather than later.

“Get me one,” Wonder Woman orders, and then there’s the brush of fingers down the side of his face.

He _tries_ not to react, but then nails graze over his skin and he shivers as they trace down his neck, onto his chest.

“Well hello, Jason,” she murmurs. “Open your eyes for me.”

It’s hard, but he does. Most of the world is a blur, but she’s leaning over him and her face is close enough for him to focus on, even though he doesn’t want to. He opens his mouth, finds his throat frozen shut, and wordlessly closes it again. One of her hands is resting on his chest, over his sternum, and he shivers again when she taps those fingers against his skin.

Her face turns upwards, there’s an exchange of words above him that he doesn’t quite catch, and then his vision catches on the back of a white-coated man as he leaves the room. The door closes with a quiet click, and Wonder Woman’s gaze turns back to him. Her free hand rises, brushes his cheek and then presses something to his lips.

“Swallow this,” she orders, and his mouth parts to let her slip what has to be one of their enhancement pills inside. He swallows it dry, winces, almost wants to cry at how fucking _helpless_ he feels.

He can barely move, can’t speak, can’t do anything but follow whatever she tells him to do and apparently that’s now his _life_. He’s not naive or stupid enough to think that even if this thing in his head fails, they’re just going to let him go. Why give up a test subject like that? Why give up having one more person to hang over Bruce’s head and taunt him with? Best case scenario he ends up in a cell for the rest of a probably short life, and that’s the _good_ option.

The fingers linger on his lips, then slide to brush over his cheek, to comb back through his hair. “You shouldn’t have provoked Clark.” He doesn’t answer, can’t. “Damian is under our protection; harm him and there _will_ be punishment, Jason. For now, I think this is enough.” The hand on his chest dips lower, grazing over his side, and _bless_ the painkillers because he can barely even feel it. “I rather like the idea of leaving you with some scars, but these weren’t quite to my tastes. Besides,” she smiles, and he shudders at the clearly predatory look, “I’m not willing to have you incapacitated for that long.”

His head is starting to clear but he wishes it wasn’t, wishes he could stay in that painkiller fog and slide right back into unconsciousness. It would make things a hell of a lot easier if he could just black out again. Even easier if he could just never wake back up.

Part of him wishes that they’d just left him in that bed. It’s the part that Roy would shake him for, when his partner would curl around him and coax him through whatever awful nightmare or new loss had made him wonder if being in this hell of a world was even really worth it anymore. That worked both ways, but he kept Roy from sinking back into addiction and usually not any worse. Roy never got those urges to head the direction of this dictatorship and just see how many of Superman’s minions he could burn through before one took him down.

Would Roy still be optimistic, even now? Dim hope for rescue or not, neither of them were ever shy of sacrifice for the greater good and if this thing in his head really works, if he’s all but their _slave_ … He’s confident enough in his own skill to know that he could kill a lot of people. Easily. If his death meant saving all of those lives, would Roy even argue? It’s the _rational_ way to think, isn’t it?

Wonder Woman gives a small smile, fingers sliding along his scalp and that’s… almost nice. It’s still vaguely sickening, but he swallows it away, closes his eyes, and tries to pretend that the light combing of his hair and scrape of nails belongs to anyone else. Kori, maybe; her nails were always longer and she loved to play with other people’s hair. So did Roy, but that was just because Roy loved _touch_.

The hand in his hair pulls tight, _yanks_ , and he sucks in a startled breath and makes a sound too weak to be a yelp, shoulders jerking against the table as his neck cranes back. His eyes fly open, body automatically trying to move, trying to retaliate, and then belatedly remembering that he’s broken in a half dozen different ways. The breath rushes out of him, painkillers failing and his mouth parting in a soundless cry at the sharp agony. Tears spring to his eyes. He can feel his ribs shift in ways they shouldn’t, feel the _fire_ as the abrupt movement jars the burns on his back and calves.

Wonder Woman tsks down at him, holding his neck back at an awkward angle that forces him to bare his throat. “That was rude, Jason. You were imagining someone else, weren’t you?”

He tries to catch his breath, tries to ease back onto the table he’s lying on and not make anything worse. But her question hangs over him, and she looks like she’s expecting an answer which just makes things worse because he _can’t_ answer. He opens his mouth helplessly, can feel the faint trembles starting in his shoulders and sweeping down his back, caused by the prolonged strain of his neck and the _pain_.

Which clues him into the kind of horrifying realization that their super-pill is canceling out the painkillers, which means that as soon as it takes full effect he’s going to be in _agony_.

Wonder Woman’s free hand rises, grabs his chin and then hooks a thumb up and onto his bottom lip. “I see Clark got tired of your voice. You can speak, Jason. Answer my question.”

The slight clench of his throat eases, and he sobs out a desperately relieved sound. “ _Yes_ ,” he admits in a gasp. “I— I was.”

Her hand lets go of his jaw, thumb pulling away from his mouth. The other stays where it is, holding his neck arched, and a particularly hard shudder drives a small whine through his teeth at the pain. It’s nothing he hasn’t taken before, but never like this. Never when his survival wasn’t at least somewhat in his own hands, and he didn’t have at least some measure of control. Even the Joker never had him really _helpless_ the way that the damn thing in his head does.

Taking something and being able to _deal_ with it are not the same thing, and right at this second he’s not sure if he can handle any more.

“It’s _very_ rude to fantasize about another person when you’re with someone; I assumed you’d know better.” A small tug that bends his neck even further back, makes him grit his teeth and try to deny the slide of tears down from the corners of his eyes. “Never imagine someone else when you’re with me. Is that clear, Jason?”

He shakes, wants to agree to anything and everything she says just to make it _stop_ , but… _Roy_ , and _Kori_.

“You can’t tell me what to think,” he manages to get out, and she gives a small smirk.

“We’ll see if that’s true.” Her free hand drifts up the arched line of his throat, and then wraps fingers around it and squeezes just hard enough to make his breath catch. “Whoever you were imagining; from now on whenever you think about them, you’re going to bite your lip hard enough to hurt.”

Jason stares at her, eyes widening at the _idea_ that she might actually be able to do that. The horror of the thought that she can make him automatically react to just a _thought_ , that she might be able to even control exactly what he can think about. That every time he thinks of Roy or Ko—

His teeth close on his bottom lip with a _snap_ , and the sharp copper tang of blood bursts to life on his tongue as he flinches. Horrified _despair_ is right on its heels.

Wonder Woman _smiles_ , leaning down over him, and he can only stifle a second sob. Her lips press to his forehead in a mockery of affection, and she whispers, “That’s for talking back to me, darling. The more you fight, the worse this will be.”

She finally lets go of him, and the table rattles a bit as he all but collapses back onto it, vision gone blurry with tears. But he can still see enough to see that she’s smiling when she sits back up.

“Now, stay here and behave for the medics, Jay-lad.” Her fingers graze over his shoulder, stroking up along his neck. “I’ll be back later; then we can move you somewhere more comfortable.”

He can’t stand the way she’s looking at him, like he’s some slab of meat laid out on display. So he closes his eyes when her hand pulls away, tilts his head into the table, and tries not to let the tears make him tremble any harder than he already is.


End file.
